Ancient Echoes by Robert Holdstock
So the heart, this ark, had always been in the Midax Deep, and Nemet had come close to it once, almost ‘home’, but then abandoned the place for the second time, after trapping me in rose-thorn, to come and find me again.
Now she was at the gates of the shrine that had hunted her, alone and unprotected, one of the seven of her tribe that Gl’Thaan Em had pursued through the earth and the minds of humankind. Baalgor was not here. And Nemet stood, shivering, staring at the sky, perhaps wondering whether to enter or run again.
I suspected that this was the moment when she would choose between life and death.
But the decision, it seemed, was no longer in her own hands; when Glanum had risen from the Deep and taken us, another spirit had controlled the movement, and he came now out of the shadows.
I sat up, then stood, watching as tall gates closed on the fires inside the heart of the sanctuary; by their flaring light, the tall, cloaked form of the Rememberer was silhouetted as he came towards me. Then the gates closed and only the grim light of the sky showed the grey eyes, and the deep scar between them.
Nemet had stepped away and dropped to a crouch, head bowed, arms across her breast, a posture of humiliation.
But John Garth was staring only at me, reaching out to touch my shoulders with skeletal but still strong hands. Below the cowl, he was smiling, a thin, grim gesture, that contained the merest hint of recognition and pleasure.
‘Garth,’ I said.
‘I remember you,’ he whispered.
‘John Garth,’ I said again, touching his fingers with my own.
‘Yes. I remember you. I can still see the boy in your face … the boy who told stories … the boy who was born on the day I finally found where GI’Thaan Em was hiding.’
‘Mister Garth …’
‘I remember you.’
‘I’ve never forgotten you either. What happened to you changed my life. I’ve always lived in two worlds; neither has any real fear for me …’
John Garth was here, in the Midax Deep; and yet he had been there, in Exburgh, and when I had stalked the ghostly streets of the city with him he had seemed not to understand everything that was happening, or that had happened. He hadn’t known the past, or so he’d claimed.
‘You must have known more than you told me. You must have known who my Greenface and Greyface were. You must have recognized the tower, and the Bull. Why did you pretend differently?’
Ahk’Nemet had begun to sing, her body rocking as she huddled. I thought she was in pain, perhaps in terror, but Garth ignored her.
‘I remember you,’ he repeated to me. ‘But then, I remember many like you. It had been a long journey, searching for the city. Memory is like an echo, Jack. It fades each time it is reflected, but somehow, never dies. I had forgotten the city. The city had forgotten me …
‘But when I saw your sketches, when I saw the crude faces in plaster in the ruins of ancient Glanum, I was looking at the last flicker of light on the faces of the two who had killed me – others had held me, but those two did the deed, drowning me in my own blood, watching me.’
He looked at Ahk’Nemet, who was silent and still, huddled and waiting for the end.
Garth went on, ‘When I saw them in your own town, I began to remember. I knew they were close, whoever they were. And I started to realize that Glanum was close too. I was unaware of who or what had been born in me, but I knew I had to return to the city. When it finally came to me, as curious about me as I was about it, it didn’t recognize me at first. I remember hauling myself up the city walls …’
‘It was spectacular to watch!’
‘It was terrifying to do. I hung there for days, wedged into the gap between a tree and the stone it grew from. I was like a bug on the city’s skip, and it tried to scratch and scour me off; but I clung on, inching my way inside. I didn’t know that I was coming home, but once inside, so much memory returned.’
I was a ghost, resurrected and adrift in my own song, passing through time, caught by that song as much as the city itself, and the beasts, and the seven who had done the deed. But I was insubstantial, surfacing at random in strange centuries, strange places in the world, only occasionally hearing the cries of the hunted, and the thunder of the sanctuary itself as it swam in pursuit of its killers.
I had been abandoned and had become lost; but I had never abandoned hope.
Garth was walking towards the gates, now open again to expose the fires beyond. Ahk’Nemet followed behind him. She had thrown down her weapons, cast off her robe. She was naked. Even the skins of her sisters lay on the ground, catching the grim light of the heart of Glanum.
At the gate, Garth stepped aside and Nemet passed through. The gates closed behind her, locking her in. She had not looked back.
The Rememberer watched me for a while, then looked at the hill, where the walls of the outer city glowed, shimmering in the moonlight from beyond the storm. He came back to me and passed me, saying, ‘And now for the other one. The brother. Come on, Jack. My Jack. He’ll come to you.’
I looked at the gates. What would happen to her? She had gone so willingly, so compliantly.
‘Garth!’
He stopped and turned, shouting at me to hurry. I stood my ground. ‘You were already dead when she put the spear in you. It’s Baalgor you want, not Nemet.’
‘Both of them. All of them,’ he said.
‘Let her go.’
John Garth stared at me for a few moments, his expression one of half concealed amusement, then said, ‘I intend to, Jack. Just as soon as her brother comes back to the sanctuary. I intend to let her go.’
He meant, of course: skinned and digested in a tent of bones and leather, fulfilling the role for which he believed she had been born.
‘Let her go,’ I urged. ‘Let her live.’
‘Why?’ the Rememberer asked, his tone mocking. ‘What is she to you?’
I struggled to say the words which would indicate my feelings; odd and inappropriate words, in their way; words of betrayal to my family; words I could scarcely believe would be so important to me. Something – perhaps the sense of being watched and monitored beyond the city walls (turn the damned thing off! The machine. The Midax eye. Let me alone!) – something stopped me expressing my love for Ahk’Nemet, my true passion for her.
I said only, ‘She’s been through enough. Can’t you see that? She’s been through enough.’
Garth watched me coldly.
‘For her, it has hardly started.’
And he turned from me again.
I went quickly to the discarded faces on the ground, but on instinct picked up only the half-skin belonging to Harikk, the Scorched One. The thin gut-threads were still in place and I pulled the tissue over my head. It was cold, slightly greasy. I looked through the slit where her eye had once watched for warning omens, I looked at the man on the hill, his hair flowing, his cloak billowing, his stride as purposeful as I remembered from my childhood.
Help your sister, I said aloud, before pursuing the Rememberer. Harikk. Help me.
Like a great, rough ship of stone, the ark of Gl’Thaan Em ploughed the ages, a hulking, savage city, surfacing as the whale, sudden, vast and shocking, to hunt and gorge on the civilizations that had once covered the earth. No mindless beast, it was sentient, furious, a creature formed unnaturally from the earth, given hope, given meaning by its creator, then abandoned, now pursuing those who had betrayed it.
I watched from the white tower, braced against the chthonian swell, Garth beside me, monstrous in his coldness, singular in his own determination to scent and catch the man who’d killed him.
I watched as nations rose and fell, the proud pillars, the totems in grinning wood, the spires of marbled granite, all of this Herculean arrogance rising in the passing of a breath, all of it crumbling in the time it took to wonder at the beauty, their shards, their ruin, sucked into the white leviathan that was Glanum, a city built to remember all life, now a malevolent leveller of all hope, th
And suddenly it surfaced into a place I knew well, into Exburgh, rising briefly among the shops and churches, the halls and arcades, swallowing back the haunting, snaring shadow it had left behind before, when it had passed this way. At once, Baalgor was thrown out of his hiding place and into the Rememberer’s song again, at loose in time, and in the world of shadows, and on his own.
‘He’s running. Ahead of us,’ Garth cried. ‘I can almost smell him … there! Look there!’
As the city plunged into the dark, I glimpsed a forest, ages old, its canopy alive with birds of carrion. Somewhere in that swathe of green, Baalgor was fleeing the Bull, the gaping, staring Bull carved on the gate of Glanum, and which had manifested as the great beast itself in my crazy, childhood visions. Garth had sensed the fear of the running man, the anguish, and using that blind instinct had pinned him down.
We came up. I was giddy with the motion. We hovered, hanging in space, vertical to the world, the shrines like limpets on the body of the whale.
Down, then! And such a dive! Down into the earth through a darkness that began to shimmer, and that shimmering illuminated corridors of bone and stone, of runes and marks, of the history of a world that had been swallowed by that greatest of tyrants, Time itself.
Up it came, rising from the Deep!
Like a shark, it chewed at the buried past.
Like a bull, it grazed the runes.
Like a cat, it clawed and played with the columns and façades of stone which had been decorated under the direction of a vision that had come from the earth itself …
From life itself!
Carved, shaped by the hands of the priests, put up to please the eye, subverted to please the soul, images of the life and the death of our prehistoric, wonderful and sensual awareness formed the ocean in which this most monstrous of all sanctuaries swam, in search of a man who had killed the first singer of the songs of blind faith.
Garth, beside me, exhilarated as Glanum plunged through the deserts of Egypt, the mountain valleys of the Hindu Kush, the monumental hills of Greece, the wind-swept, yellow grasslands of the New World, even biting at the bulking, ruddy, painted rocks of what I imagine was Australia at a time so long in the past that only a whisper of the songs we heard remained in my own age.
At last, Baalgor himself gave up the ghost, swallowed by the Bull-Gate, hunted through the world of my own pre-conscious and perhaps captured by my own willingness to have him caught, for this was partly a world of my own making, and surely by persistence I could make things happen! Yet strangely, I felt a moment’s sadness as he tumbled among the earth and stone of his crude hiding place, which also had been consumed when he was bitten out of his wild running.
He recognized me at once, and came towards me. He stripped off his stinking cloak of scalps and feathers and threw it at my feet. His naked body bled from cuts. The clay had broken away from his body. Tattooed eyes gazed unblinking from his hard-boned flesh.
‘I didn’t kill my father.’
‘I know you didn’t.’
He seemed surprised, stepping forward. ‘Nemet killed my father.’
‘I know.’
‘Then if you know … why are you hunting me?’
‘I’m not. He is …’
Baalgor glanced contemptuously at Garth, but seemed confused as he looked back. ‘But he’s the skinner of souls! I killed him because he was taking something that didn’t belong to him!’
‘I know.’
‘You know?’
‘I have a good idea, at least. It all happened a long time in the past.’
‘What past? It’s now! He’s come back. He’s come back! And it will all start again …’
‘He came back, Baalgor. A long time ago. He came back. And it did all start again. And in the words of the cliché: that’s life! And life as we know it has been terrorized by the Great Lie ever since.’
‘The Great Lie was this place of beasts. What do you mean … What do you mean by the Great Lie?’
Baalgor, young and raging, naked and bleeding, was a man doomed to die, but still violent in his defence of his philosophy.
‘That there is something greater than you and I, an all-seeing eye … a maker.’
‘But I know that’s not true! That’s why I killed the Rememberer! It all belongs to us! The life and death of even a single sprig of thyme … it happens. The flood that takes our dogs and donkeys, the rains that fill our wells … it happens. It belongs to us. When we go on, when we die, we have only the Fragrant Pasture, a wonderful place. It’s where we all go, the young who die in the womb, the old man who has been blind all his life, the strongest and the weakest of us. We all go there. It belongs to us.’
‘I know.’
He was wild, frightened. Not at all the menacing figure who had taunted me from the Shimmering. ‘You know! You keep saying you know.’
‘Yes. And you’re right. It’s now. And right now, whatever you did, whatever you believed, whatever deed, terrible or wonderful you performed, is just a story! From the long-long-gone. Older than the Oldest Testament. Forgotten. It’s of no importance. Only one thing matters to me.’
He had laughed inadvertently when I had talked about ‘story’. Now, in an attempt to be brazen, he sneered at me. ‘You. Yourself. Your precious daughter.’
I smiled at him, but my heart was racing. In this strange place, Natalie had suddenly called to me. I could imagine her at play, perhaps calling for her ‘funny’ friend, and I wanted to be with her, to be safe with her, to have her safely in my arms again.
‘Yes. Me. Myself. My precious daughter. I thought you were lying. You know all about it. You are the same entity. You stole my daughter. And you certainly know why I will never let you go.’
He stared at me thoughtfully for a long time before speaking. ‘Yes. Natalie. She was my only hope.’
He sounded defeated! My spirits soared. He’d lost!
‘You still have her, then.’
‘Some of her. I only ever had some of her. I took what I could, but mostly it was your love for her that helped me.’ He smiled, staring me straight in the eye, a man lost, I realized. ‘I enjoyed dancing with her … Jack. I told her funny stories; by return, she told me funny stories of her own. Childish stories … more charming than amusing … she is the daughter I would have wanted, funny, teasing, willing to listen … I took her into my hiding place …’
‘Give her back to me.’
‘Give back what? I took her there, but I kept only a shadow of her laughter, a shadow of her beauty, an echo of her life … she was just an echo … You can hardly have expected me to have told you that. Thin skins, stitched together like my cloak to make the illusion of a woman. My skill, if I had a skill, was not in stripping the soul from your daughter, but in making you believe that I had done so …’
‘Give her back to me.’
‘There’s nothing to give back,’ Baalgor said, and he had suddenly aged. ‘And what I took is precious to me. You’ll not miss it. She’ll not miss it …’
‘I want the shades. All of them.’
‘You can’t put spilled drink back in the beaker,’ he said quietly, and added with a smile, ‘You can’t put piss back in the belly. But then – such loss hardly matters.’
Shaking his head he reached for his cloak, held it to his chest, his eyes closed, his fingers rubbing the feathers of the carrion crows whose scalped corpses had supplied the ruff that had once adorned his neck.
‘I took nothing,’ he said quietly. ‘Nothing of consequence. Not from you. Not from Natalie. I tried only to stop the skinning, the burial with beasts, the sanctuary.’
‘The first sacrifices …’
‘Yes.’
‘You failed.’
‘Yes. I’m painfully aware of the fact.’
Throughout this long exchange, John Garth had stood silently, w
He started to move away, Baalgor walking stiffly before him. But I stepped between the two of them and shook my head. ‘I won’t let you take her. Not Nemet. I’ll hunt you down, Garth; I’ll pursue you with all the blind determination of Glanum itself if you destroy her now.’
‘I know you will,’ he whispered.
He came towards me and to my astonishment reached round to embrace me, holding me against his breast for a minute or so, silent but for his breathing. The odour of burnt tar and fresh mud was powerful on him. I could feel the heavy thump of his heart, the slow rise and fall of his chest.
When he drew back he quickly touched a finger to my cheek, to the false skin of Nemet’s sister. The touch moved to my chin, then my mouth, and Garth watched me curiously as he marked out the shape of the scorched woman on my grizzled features.
‘I haven’t found this one yet. She is still hiding.’
‘Then let her go too. Haven’t you had your fill of death?’ I could still smell the slaughterhouse around the white tower.
John Garth said, ‘That’s what you see, isn’t it? That’s all that has happened to your vision over the thousands of years – it sees death alone. Jack, Gl’Thaan Em wasn’t built as a place of death, but as a place of life! You have the stories in your own age, of the Ark, the place of preservation. Why can’t you accept that in the far-gone we did things differently? The infant sanctuary of what you call Jericho, the prehistoric place that was born with me, was about keeping time still. Everywhere, the earth was being hardened into walls, like sores on pristine skin. And the memories of the people were hardening too – what was once remembered naturally, now was being forgotten as the very pattern of life changed on the skin of the world.